Railway

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Operations Manager

Remote (anywhere)

Full-time

Job description

Railway takes your code from idea to production in a straight line. Developers — and increasingly their agents — build and push, and we handle the rest. No transfers, no friction, no infrastructure overhead. It’s working: we’re growing quickly, expanding globally, and entering the most consequential phase in the company’s history.

Operations builds the systems that let the rest of the company move fast, and owns the surface area where Railway meets the real world — vendors, infrastructure, and the messy edges in between. The bar is leverage: a small team covering broad scope through systems and judgment.

This role is for that operator. You’ll own the operational surface area that makes Railway’s growth possible — working across procurement, data center operations, and internal systems to design and run workflows that scale. Coordination is part of the job, but your goal is to replace it with systems. You’ll take on problems before they have a defined shape, build the tooling and processes that solve them, and drive execution end-to-end.

You’ll work directly across every team in the company, shaping how Railway operates as it scales. The scope is broad, the leverage is high, and your impact is defined by what you build.

Want to learn about our work culture? Here is a three-part blog series that will help you see the unique ways our team works (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

About the role

You’ll own and drive the systems and workflows that power Railway’s operational surface area:

  • Cross-functional execution. The work that lives between teams — projects that span multiple functions, don't have a natural owner, and need someone who can hold the whole thing in their head and drive it to done.
  • Procurement. Vendor sourcing, security review, contract negotiation, PO issuance, invoice reconciliation. Standardize what's repeatable; keep judgment in the loop where it matters.
  • Internal tooling and data. Turn recurring work into systems and recurring questions into dashboards. The tools don't matter; the instinct does.
  • Hardware deployment lifecycle. From PO through delivery, racking, and handoff to the Infra team — and the loop back through asset tracking, decommissions, and the next wave. Infra handles the infrastructure work itself; you own the lifecycle around it that makes their job possible. You won't start as the expert here; we expect you to become one.
  • Special projects. New problem spaces that show up because Railway is growing. Things we haven't done before, things that don't fit existing functions, things that need someone to figure out from scratch and either build into a system or hand off cleanly.

    • About you

  • You take on problems that don't have a defined shape yet. The work this role does today won't be the work it does in twelve months. You're energized by that, not stressed by it.
  • You have strong instincts about where automation pays back and where it doesn't. You're equally willing to roll up your sleeves on a one-off and to invest in tooling when the work will repeat. The objective is to scale the business — not to automate everything.
  • You have strong judgment on when to build, when to buy, and when to ignore.
  • You communicate clearly across domains — from engineering to vendors to finance and legal
  • You catch problems before they compound — and know which ones are worth fixing

    • We value and love to work with diverse persons from all backgrounds

    Things to know

    For better or worse, we're a startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of different sizes and stages.

    • We're distributed ALL across the globe, and that's only going to be more and more distributed. As a result, stuff is ALWAYS happening.
    • We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you'll have to be diligent about your boundaries because the end of your day may overlap with the start of someone else's.
    • We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well. At the time of writing we're 21, serving hundreds of thousands of users. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.
    • We want you to own it. We believe that ownership is a key to growth, and part of that growth is not only being able to make the choices, but owning the success, or failure, that comes with those choices.

    Benefits and perks

    At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more. For more details, check back on the main careers page.

    Beyond compensation, there are a few things that we believe that make working at Railway truly unique:

    • Autonomy: We have very few meetings. Just a Monday and a Friday to go over the Company Board. We think your time is sacred, whether it's at work, or outside of work.
    • Ownership: We're a company with a high ownership, high autonomy culture. We hope that you'll come in, help us, and over the course of many years do the best work of your life. When we bring you onboard, we expect you to change the company.
    • Novel problems/solutions: We're a startup that's well funded, with cool problems, which lets us implement novel solutions! We abhor “busywork” and think, whether it's community, engineering, operations, etc there's always opportunity for creative and high leverage solutions.
    • Growth: We want you to grow with us, but we know that talent is loaned, so when you figure out what area you want to grow in next, whether it's at Railway or outside, we'll make sure you land there.

    How we hire

    No tricks. No surprises. Here's the entire process.

    1

    Talk with us about the role

    This is completely open ended and we're just trying to see who you are, what you want to do, and where you wanna go.

    2

    Work on a small project to discuss in the interview

    Asynchronously implement the following:

  • Technical Interview

    • You can, and SHOULD! ask us questions ahead of time. Ask away!

    3

    Review your solution with the Team

    You'll sit down with someone on the team and go over the above. We'll poke into your solution, as well as get you acquainted with two more members of the team.

    Looking for: Learn about your problem solving skills. How you break down a problem and how you present a solution.

    4

    Meet the Team

    You'll meet the Team, which will be comprised of 4 people from vastly different sections of the company.

    Looking for: How you work with the rest of the team and communicate.

    5

    Chat with CEO

    Sit down with our founder and CEO for 30 minutes. This is a 1:1, open ended conversation.

    6

    Offer call

    Finally, we will present the offers, hammer out the details about your position, tee up onboarding, and start our journey together.

    Final Note: The interview goes both ways. Once again, please ask us things. Many things! Hard things. That's what we're here for.

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